Weekend Update 1/20/2018: One year later…

It seems fitting that the anniversary of the tyrant’s inaugural and the women’s march would coincide with a government shutdown that has come about entirely through the Republicans’ incompetence. They have a majority in both houses of congress, and while in theory the Democrats could filibuster the spending resolution, they haven’t had to, yet, because the Repubs can’t get all of their own people to vote for the bill! It’s just symptoms of the problems ushered in when the tyrant who lost the popular vote slipped through the Electoral College and the white supremacist wing of the Republican base felt free to take off their civil disguises. Now Republicans who would normally be willing to make a deal are scared of being primaried out by angry Trump supporters.

Russell Burman, writing in the Atlantic explains:

If there’s one thing Democrats and Republicans (some publicly, many others privately) agree on, it’s that the president’s negotiating style has made it much harder for the two sides to reach a deal. Trump has veered wildly from one extreme to the other—telling lawmakers in one meeting that he’d sign any DACA bill Congress sent him, then issuing a list of hard-line demands in the next. His vulgar reference to African nations, among others, as “shithole countries” while rejecting a bipartisan DACA proposal blew up the negotiations at a critical juncture.

Republicans have begged the president to tell them exactly what he’d accept in an agreement and then stick to it. But Trump hasn’t delivered.

The Republicans have tried to paint the Democrats as the villains in this, but their attempts make them look worse: Mitch McConnell shutdown tweet a ‘ransom note,’ says DNC head.

Meanwhile, across the country, millions of members of the resistance are turning out to march again: Women’s March draws crowds to DC and WATCH: Thousands Mark Trump’s Anniversary with 2018’s Women’s March. Most cities in the country will see these marches today, and I think that’s a good thing.

I’ve seen people arguing that marches don’t do anything, but they’re wrong. They said that same thing in 1993 about the March on Washington for Lesbian, Gay and Bi Equal Rights and Liberation, because congresspeople who had opposed queer rights didn’t all spontaneously change their minds afterward. But that isn’t the point of these demonstrations. When more the 800,000 queer people trekked across the country to stand up and protest, it did more than send a message. It demonstrated, for one thing, that there were a lot more of us than most people realized. More importantly, it demonstrated to us that we weren’t alone. It inspired hope in the individual queer communities among people who didn’t go. And those that did came back energized and inspired, and they did stuff! We organized new groups. More of us volunteered for local political campaigns. We staffed phone banks, we opened our wallets. We began to believe that if we worked together we could convince the rest of society to come around to our way of thinking. We didn’t have immediate success, but progress noticeably accelerated after that.

Last year’s Women’s March was the first time after the election that I felt hope again. And I’m the kind of person who normally never gives up hope. At a deep, fundamental level my brain does not believe in the no-win scenario, right? But when Trump won the electoral college, all of that crashed down.

Until I saw the hug crowds, vastly outnumbering the inaugural crowd not just in Washington D.C., but in cities all across the country.

There are more of us than they realized. There are more of us than we believed.

It’s from that moment of inspiration that moment such as Run For Something was born. The march inspired people back in their communities to get involved. Not just to wear a pink hat and make protest signs, but to join political action groups, to staff phone banks, to support progressive candidates, and to run for office. We got the dramatically different results in the Virginia elections this year than before in no small part because there were dozens of districts where previously the Republican had run unopposed again and again that finally there was an alternative!

And last year’s march can take credit for that.

The fact that the tyrant is such an incompetent, creepy, and transparently bigoted cretin is also a contributing factor. I’ve seen a few experts make the claim that White House ineptitude and biases are solely to blame for their failures. But that ignores the fact that what we are protesting is this administrations bigotry and callous disregard for facts or other people, and overarching greed—in other words, their biases and ineptitude. We’re fighting a good fight, and the fact that the opposition is not fighting well is not unrelated. However, there is a lot of fight left to go. We have to keep the momentum going not just in the Congressional election next fall, but in local elections, and continuing to make those phone calls to congress, and showing up at protests and more. But it’s a fight we can win.

And our country isn’t the only one dealing with corruption:
UK government kept awarding public sector contracts to Carillion despite fears about its future, minister admits and UK government officials set up Carillion collapse task force to support companies and workers. So there’s a lot of bad to fight against…